Monday, May 25, 2009

6 metre bonanza

There was a great 6m opening here in Europe this afternoon. I thought something must be up when I heard loud signals from G stations as near as South Manchester on 20 metres. With skip that short, there had to be sporadic-E about.

I'm sure that stations with beams and good VHF locations did better than me, but I was happy to work Croatia, Italy, Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, France and Germany on my attic dipole. One that got away was Cyprus. He was a good signal, but there was a huge pile-up, and I dislike pile-ups.

I was using my Elecraft K3 and the latest version of KComm, my logging software, which can now spot VHF contacts to the DX Cluster in the format used by propagation analysis sites like vhfdx.net. Unfortunately the program seemed to be doing some odd things, like overwriting a station's locator or name field in the log with one from an earlier contact. And it crashed after adding one contact. I don't know when, if ever,the program will be stable enough that I can release a new version for others to use.